Susan Jacoby and The Age of Unreason

Excerpt from Bill Moyers' interview with Susan Jacoby on her latest book "the Age of American Unreason".

BILL MOYERS: You have a powerful section in here on what's happened to our political language. How, for example, politicians so often talk these days not about people but ab-

SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.

BILL MOYERS: --folks-

SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.

BILL MOYERS: --about the folks. What's wrong that?

SUSAN JACOBY: What's wrong with it is folks used to be a colloquialism. It was the kind of thing that you'd talk about mostly in rural areas, mostly in the south and the Midwest. People talked about folks. It was not considered suitable for public speech. If you used it in the classroom your teacher would, you know, would get after you, because it wasn't considered appropriate language.

But think about ....More